Numerous problems have plagued both the design and maintenance of gymnasium floors. Hardwood has had many advantages, but maintenance thereof has sometimes been costly. For some hardwood floor situations such as in foyers, requiring no resiliency, the use of hardwood impregnated with a suitable plastic monomer and the in situ polymerization thereof has provided an impregnated structure having sufficient durability to reduce maintenance costs significantly. The plastic impregnated wood is not completely free from troublesome amounts of dimensional change attributable to changes of humidity. The humidity-induced expansion of plastic-impregnated hardwood of the prior art has not been as troublesome in small areas as in gymnasiums or other large areas covered with a flooring involving wood products. Gymnasium floors have sometimes buckled because large forces are generated by the humidity-induced expansion of unmodified hardwood.
Plywood has less humidity induced expansion than wooden strips. Various combinations of wooden strips, resilient pads, plywood subflooring, and hardwood floor have sometimes been employed for seeking to achieve a combination of dimensional stability and limited resilience for the total floor structure. Basketball players do not like to play on a concrete or other floor completely lacking resiliency. Basketball players can recognize the presence or absence of the desired degree of resiliency in a gymnasium floor. A resilient floor is significantly more valuable than an unyielding floor because its resiliency can be recognized by some. Gymnasium floors have been constructed with steel channels anchored to the concrete subflooring, with the hardwood securely anchored at a sufficient number of points to the steel channels to bring about compression and stretching of the hardwood instead of dimensional changes, as described in Robbins U.S. Pat. No. 3,271,916. Attempts have been made to provide air conditioning systems sufficiently reliable and perfect to minimize humidity changes for overcoming the problems of dimensional change in hardwood floors, but costly buckling has sometimes occurred at gymnasiums equipped with air conditioning.
Because all of the hardwood systems have involved so much maintenance and installation expense, a variety of alternatives, including polyurethane flooring and other plastic flooring have been employed in gymnasiums. Although hundreds have struggled with the problem, architects have long been frustrated by the conspicuous absence of any moderately priced system for building a resilient basketball floor using a low-cost field application and permitting long-term low-cost maintenance, notwithstanding the long-standing demand for such moderately priced basketball floors.